The left one is Tsuji (Boxer player). Chamu (Chun player)is in the middle, and idonno who’s the other one.
Wow, it seems like ST has such deep roots compared to any other fighting game.
Geadom - close but no cigar:
I posted this link in that other thread. Video of USA, Ashitana*, T.Akiba vs. Inro from X-Mania 2000.
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- Aka Good-foot Tanaka, that zass discussed above.
http://www.wikiupload.com/download_page.php?id=134237
- Aka Good-foot Tanaka, that zass discussed above.
EDIT: btw, the end of the third video features a nice example of the “iron” jumping short mentioned on the blog
yo, zass, how do you feel about thawk vs ryu?
I’m not a hardcore ST player, but that was still fun to read nonetheless. Good stuff :tup:.
my question was deleted, so here it goes again… what about your second or third entry to X-Mania? any better?
Nah, I’m back in the states now. I was there in 2004/2005. I really wanna go back though…:sad:
Fantastic thread. Shame I didn’t read sooner.
so no more war stories?? :sad:
Good read
dude do you remember a JPN player called Zenji I think and he used to use boxer in SF Dash/champion edition.
what ever happened to him
Sorry for the delay in posting. There are certainly more war stories. I will post them.
In the meantime, I thought I’d start a super turbo blog. I’ve been getting back into the game since I started this thread. I’m posting how I’m trying to improve and get better.
comments welcome.
Julien
On team USA!
Around 2000 or so, there was a big 3 on 3 team tournament for Alpha 3. Now I had never really been a big fan of A3 – to me it just seemed like A2 with harder to execute custom combos. At least in A2, anyone could pick chun li, mash the CC activation, and do upkicks. That’s how I took 3rd at B2. But in A2, you had to really time the combos. So it was everything that I hated about a game. Execution heavy, you had to be really precise, and there was one dominating strategy that beat everything else. I’m sure I’m oversimplying, but that was my opinion of A3.
Anyways, I played it, because no one played A2, and I didn’t know about the dedicated ST arcades. Believe it or not, I played for years in Japan without touching ST! I just didn’t know that there were entire arcades dedicated to ST. If you think about it, it’s not as wierd as it sounds that I wouldn’t know. You had to talk to players, and get into the gaming community – at the time, I would just stop off at random arcades after work. I knew some players (I made friends with a couple of Japanese people through A3), but I really didn’t know about tournaments. I was basically a random gaijin that would pop his head in an arcade every week or so. Most of my free time was spent on everquest anyways :wgrin:. In fact, it was Kuni that got me into the gaming community there.
One day, I was playing in Akihabara, which was an area of town I almost never went to. As a quick aside, Akihabara is the famous “electronics disneyland” of tokyo. It’s where you go to find any kind of electronic piece you want. For example, when I first moved to japan, I didn’t know that my computer, which ran on 110 volts, would also run on the Japanese 100 volts. This might be obvious to most of you, but I was in an foreign country with a brand new computer (it could play Unreal 1 almost lag-free, a real powerhouse 
), and I did not want it to explode when I plugged it into a socket. So I went out looking for a 110->100 volt transformer. Believe me these are not easy to find. I went to Akihabara, with my pitiful second year Japanese skills, and asked around. I got a lot of blank stares, and “what the hell do you need that for???”, but I was persistent, and eventually found a back alley that looked like what you see in Jackie Chan movies full of old men and bins of shady and unreliable looking equipment. And one of these old guys had a 110->100 volt transformer!
Anyways, I never went to Akihabara unless I wanted to buy something, because it was pretty out of the way of where I normally went (Shibuya or Shinjuku). TZW’s arcade, the famous TRI amusement tower was there, and there was also a SEGA arcade near the station. I was playing at the Sega arcade, and this Japanese guy with big hair is staring at me. We play a couple of games and he keeps looking at me right in the eye! I can tell you this is pretty damn unusual in Japan. This guy eventually starts talking to me, in English, and asks me if I know about US street fighter players. I say yes, and it turns out his name is Kuni, and he used to play with the LA crowd! Cool! So once I got to know Kuni, he introduced me to the tournament scene. I learned about the Game in Namiki tournaments, and it’s through those that I started playing regular ST at the Shibuya Kaikan arcade. So thanks Kuni! If it wasn’t for him, I would have just played the occasional game of A3 or whatever at random arcades, and never really gotten to know all the people I got to know.
With all of this said, I learned through Kuni that there was going to be a big 3 on 3 Alpha 3 tournament. Now as I said at the beginning, I wasn’t super hot on A3, but I didn’t play much ST at the time, and there wasn’t much else to do. Plus, it turned out that some US players, namely John Choi and Alex Valle, were going to show up. This was going to be a big tournament, not just run at an arcade, but at an exhibition hall, with seats, and a big overhead screen. This sounded pretty exciting! Remember, the biggest tournaments I had been to was B2 (which was in the basement of the MIT arcade), and B3 (much bigger, at SVGL, but still at an arcade). This was at a convention center!! I knew John from B3, B2, and random SVGL tournaments I had gone to over the years, but I didn’t know Alex too well. I had seen him win B3, and I had stopped once through LA, where we played a couple of games on A2. But to tell you the truth, I had never really talked to either of them other than the “good game” you give your opponent after a tournament match. Anyways, both of them were giants of the game. The unquestioned #1 and #2 players in the US (at least that I knew of). This was after the famous Daigo exhibition (“push some buttons, Cole!”), so I knew that the Japanese top tier was at its own level, but I was excited to see how these two would do.
I came to the tournament site, and said hi to them with Kuni. We talked a little bit, it turns out that Alex had passport problems and had almost been unable to come. And there was a problem. Well, the problem was that these two were just that – two. This was a 3 on 3 team tournament. They needed a third player. All of a sudden all heads turned to me. Why not have Julien as the third? My first reaction was of dismay. I felt like I could hold my own in A2, but A3? I’m worse than a random scrub in that game! I played X-Sodom for god’s sake! My second reaction was “wow, I get to represent team USA with JOHN CHOI and ALEX VALLE… wooooooow”. My second reaction won over my first. I was in!
I did the obligatory prep talk where I explained to John and Alex that I sucked and wasn’t prepared. I explained that I had no idea that I would be in this, and if I had, I would have practiced, etc, etc, ad nauseum. No problem! They laughed it off and said it would be fun. We joked that all the members of “team USA” had a non USA passport! I had a French one, John had a Korean one, and Alex a Peruvian one. No actual USA in team USA! Funny! I guess we were really representing the “melting pot”. These two giants of the game were actually pretty cool guys in person! I felt a lot better about it. I ended up going with X-Rolento instead of X-Sodom. I figured I can always catch a scrubby ryu with the super, right? Also he had a decent keepaway game with low fierce. Basically I was playing my A2 characters in A3 without CC’s and level 1 or 2 supers. Rolento’s level 1 and 2 supers suck anyways.
So our first game came up, and we played against some team. I honestly don’t even remember who they played, but we all got skunked. Yep, team USA, flown in from abroad, got skunked in round 1. Well, maybe that’s not so bad. Maybe we lost to a really good team, right? Maybe it was the equivalent of Daigo-Kurahashi-YuuVega? Haha, I only wish. I followed the progress of the team that beat us, and on their next round they lost to a team whose captain was a girl. Not only did they lose, but they all lost to the girl. The girl did a once character victory on them!
So let me break this down. Team USA, with supposedly the top US players, lost to a team who in turn lost their entire team to a GIRL. I had to laugh. That was about as bad as it got. I remember thinking of Seth’s classic line to Stiltman:
We should have gotten our own t-shirt made. “Team USA: We give minor trouble to teams that get skunked by girls in Japan!”. Powerful stuff.
Anyways, the tournament organizers figured we deserved a second chance. We had come all this way… I think they were expecting some kind of epic USA vs Japan finals, Rocky style, with the crowd cheering. So we got a second chance. I’m not sure how, but we were allowed back in with “an extra life”, later in the tournament. I’m sure this would cause a huge outrage at an American tournament. Can you imagine clawing your way up the ranks to the top 8, only to have some random team from Swaziland in the top 8 with you? A team that hadn’t made it past round 1? I’d be pretty pissed :mad:. But I appreciated the second life!
Well, needless to say, we got raped again. We all had a good laugh about it. Obviously we weren’t top tier in this game. Kuni was a great translator, and we probably have him to thank for our second shot. Kuni was a great proponent of the american “killer” style of street fighter (playing mercilessly, like repeat ticking). I’m sure he was out there telling the tournament directors how great we were.
So that’s my story of how I represented the US in the first USA-Japan team tournament. There was another one a couple of years later where the teams were much larger, and it was across various games like ST, MvC2, 3rd strike, etc. But as badly as we lost, I still feel honored that I had the chance to represent the US with two of the greatest players to have ever played the game.
nice read man
post more
This was the first time American players had ever gone over to Japan. At this point and it may sound naive - but we didn’t really know about Japanese vs. American joysticks let alone buttons and what it all meant. American’s hadn’t used a ball top joystick since the days of Ms. Pac-Man. No one could have seen that one coming!
I remember talking to Choi over IRC a lot at this point. Alex going had been planned but not for very long. Maybe a month at the latest? Choi going was VERY last minute. The Cannons bought Choi the ticket if I remember right - unfortunately Choi checked his passport and it had already expired. So he had to rush to Kinko’s at like midnight then rush to embassy then basically hopped on the plane with nothing more but Gunter’s phone number. Kuni picked them both up and as far as I remember they went straight from Narita to the arcade to enter the tournament.
At this point there was the realization of American players not really being able to use Jpnese sticks. So they spent like an hour trying to come up with some solution. At one point I remember Gunter telling me it was like a Jpnese stick with the ball removed and some crazy cylindrical metal piece put on top. Pretty sure that everyone agreed (even Julien) that it was worse than a Jpnese stick.
So they opted to play on Jpnese sticks and no one could dragon punch let alone execute customs. The Chun Li that they lost to however was a pretty famous chun li player - Maki. She used to have a website dedicated to her - The Chun Princess. I’m sure it was some ghetto jpnese geocities website but she wasn’t just some random girl.
Everyone left the tournament and basically got back on the plane. I’m like 90% positive that Choi/Valle flew out on Friday here in America and arrived back on Monday morning to go to work. In fact I know Sirlin picked up Choi to take him to work on Monday morning.
So yeah - Daigo came to America and now Choi/Valle have gone to Jpn at this point. Now we learned about the importance of equipment and how it changes everything. After this is when a lot of things changed - like getting the jpnese a cabinet for when they came for B5, etc.
Derek Daniels
good read.
Also, I found a link to the Kanto vs Kansai results page that I posted in my first post in the thread:
http://kahyuu.ld.infoseek.co.jp/xmania2001.9.htm
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Looks like I won 2 games, then lost to someone 
Posting in a legendary thread.
That was one of the greatest things I have read, ever.
LoL… Ahh the glory days of trial and error